When it looked as if Hurricane Rita was going to make a direct hit on Houston, Norris Pillette knew what he had to do.

The 52-year-old boilermaker rushed home to board up his house. When he finished nailing plywood over his windows, Pillette packed his SUV with some clothes, a couple cases of water and, along with his girlfriend, set out to obey the city's evacuation order. But they didn't get very far.

"I started trying to get out of the city around 1 p.m. on Thursday," he told me. First Pillette tried using U.S. 59, but it was packed with vehicles. Then he made his way to Interstate 45 only to find that it, too, was clogged. The backup on that road stretched for miles. "All those roads looked like big parking lots," he said.

After sitting in backups for six hours, Pillette made his way back home and started calling airlines. But he couldn't get a plane out of either of the city's two commercial airports. So Friday morning, Pillette and his girlfriend tried again to drive out of Houston. "This time we stayed out there for about three hours before we gave up. They should have had better control of the traffic," he said. And he's right.

Fateful turn

When Hurricane Rita made a last-minute turn to the north and came ashore with 120-mph winds and torrential rainfall near the Texas-Louisiana border, Houston dodged a bullet in more ways than one. The nation's fourth-largest city avoided a direct hit and massive structural damage. It also avoided the great human tragedy that might have resulted had the hurricane struck Houston while thousands of motorists were stuck on jammed roadways. Fortunately, that didn't happen — but it could have.

Maybe the most important lesson from what happened in Houston and earlier in New Orleans is that it's one thing to tell people to evacuate, but it's quite another to make it possible for them to get out.

While it was the desperate circumstances of the people who were jammed into New Orleans' Superdome and convention center that became the focus of national attention in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, the bumper-to-bumper exodus of motorists trying to drive out of that city got only fleeting notice. Roadways were jammed for more than a day as 80% of New Orleans' 480,000 residents heeded the city's evacuation order.

Last week, Texas officials provided specially fitted oil tanker trucks to ensure that motorists fleeing Houston didn't run out of gas. But what they didn't anticipate was the number of vehicles that would clog the roads, sometimes making it impossible for tankers to get to stranded motorists.

Overwhelmed by traffic

The head of Texas' emergency operations center told the Houston Chronicle that the agency's plan to get people out of the city was outstripped by the number of people who obeyed the order. Add to this the long lines that developed at the city's airports when many Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screeners didn't show up for work, and Houston's close encounter with Hurricane Rita becomes even more chilling.

All of this should drive home an immutable point: Planning for — and overseeing — the evacuation of major urban areas ought to be a federal responsibility. City and state governments are severely limited in what they can do to effectuate a large-scale urban evacuation.

Some of the main routes out of New Orleans and Houston are on interstate highways that quickly take motorists across state jurisdictional lines. Getting people through airports depends heavily on the work done by the TSA. Texas officials were slow to open all lanes of the main exit routes to outbound traffic — and had no control over security screening at Houston's airports. As a result, the lives of a lot of people were put in jeopardy.

This time, Pillette and many others escaped unharmed after being stranded in harm's way. The next time, they might not be so lucky.